Anyone who grew up in or around conservative Christian families knows that Dolly Parton was swimming against the tide when she debuted her now-iconic look in the sleepy hills of East Tennessee, and indeed, her flashy, skin-tight style elicited quite the negative reaction from most of her elder relatives, including her preacher grandfather. “I got whipped all the time,” Parton recalled in a 2025 interview on 60 Minutes Australia. “[My parents said] that I look cheap and I couldn’t wear this, I couldn’t wear that. I would do it, though. I wasn’t afraid. You know, I would do it. Even if I had to take it off, I’d still do it again.”
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The country singer said her mother, Avie Lee Owens, was more understanding. “She got it,” Parton said. “She got me.” Parton said her mother knew her daughter had talent and that the look was just a part of the package deal of who she would become as a performer. Sometimes, Owens would even help Parton make a neckline a little lower or a hemline a little shorter. “She’d say, ‘Now, you know you’re going to get me and you in trouble with your daddy,’ or whatever. But she would help me with that.” The men in Parton’s family were less receptive.
As is often the case, Parton’s grandparents were even stricter than her parents. Parton said her grandfather, a preacher, used to think she was “going to hell in a hand basket in the early days.” Even as the days wore on, Parton’s look got no less risqué—in fact, quite the opposite—but her grandfather learned to accept it. Not because he warmed up to Parton’s look but because of a song she wrote for him.
Dolly Parton’s Grandfather Learned to Accept Her Because of This Song
Most musicians can attest to dealing with some level of incredulity from their family over their chosen profession. The entertainment industry is notoriously brutal and fickle, and it can be difficult watching loved ones—particularly children and grandchildren—willingly walk into the belly of that beast. For Dolly Parton’s elders, watching her do so in skin-tight dresses, sky-high hair, and enough makeup to stock a reasonably sized mall cosmetics kiosk made it even tougher. That all changed after Parton released a song she wrote in honor of her grandfather, Reverend Jake Owens, on a 1970 collaborative album with Porter Wagoner.
Parton and Wagoner’s fifth album together, Once More, had only one single: its opening track, “Daddy Was an Old Time Preacher Man”. As anyone who knew of Parton’s upbringing might expect, the song was a biographical tribute to her actual grandfather, which she co-wrote with her aunt, Dorothy Jo Hope. “Daddy was an old-time preacher man,” the song begins. “He preached the word of God throughout the land / He preached so plain a child could understand.”
“He thought I was fine after that,” Parton half-joked on 60 Minutes Australia. “After that, he’d just meet people on the street. ‘You know Dolly Parton? That’s my granddaughter. You know that old song, ‘Old Time Preacher Man’? That’s about me.’ After he saw that, you know, I was gonna be okay, I was going to make a living, and that I wasn’t as trashy as I looked, that was just the way I looked, he just prayed, ‘Lord, forgive her. She knows not what she does.’ And just let it go.”
Sometimes, that’s all anyone can ask of a strict grandpa.
Photo by Richard E. Aaron/Redferns
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